Anubis's Own Bot Wall Blocks the Scrape of Its WebAssembly Post

The linked page was supposed to be a Techaro blog post on the year-long effort to ship WebAssembly in Anubis, but the retrieved content is instead Anubis’s own anti-bot interstitial — the tool blocked the very attempt to fetch the article about it. That leaves nothing to report on the WebAssembly work itself; what’s available is a description of what Anubis is and why it exists.

Anubis is a defense against aggressive AI scrapers that hammer sites hard enough to cause downtime. It borrows the Hashcash idea: force each visitor’s browser to solve a proof-of-work challenge that’s trivial for one person but expensive at scraper scale, raising the cost of mass crawling. The project frames this as a stopgap — the longer-term goal is fingerprinting headless browsers (for example, by quirks in font rendering) so legitimate users rarely see a challenge at all.

One practical catch: Anubis relies on modern JavaScript that privacy plugins like JShelter disable, so users running such extensions must whitelist the domain to get through. To actually cover the WebAssembly milestone, the article would need to be fetched in a way that clears the challenge.